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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Mac Chimes of Death
We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades. What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot. And they are glorious: Macintosh II…
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Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
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Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
tl;dr: it depends. About one year ago, I bought an Intel N100 mini PC (specifically the GMKtec N100 NucBox G3) and compared it to the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. A year later, and we have a newer $159 16GB version of that mini PC with a slightly-faster Intel N150, and a new 16GB Raspberry Pi 5. I re-ran all my benchmarks, and…
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use
This blog post reveals how you can salvage lithium cells from the many discarded, disposable vape devices that get littered in our towns and cities. With a pair of pliers and some bravery, I manage...
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Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM
So many lines in that song have been surpassed, but RAM sticks out as something that hasn’t.
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Body Hacking: Thoughts Regarding My Magnet Implant
I've had a magnet implanted in my finger for about three years. Here are some thoughts about having the implant and feeling a whole new world.
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Modifying an HDMI dummy plug's EDID using a Raspberry Pi
I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI “dummy plug” pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn’t support a 4K resolution. The story behind why is a long one that I’m still…
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Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
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Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...
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A nearly perfect USB cable tester
Your USB cables may lie to your PC. Let me show you how to catch those.
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Chasing RFI Waves – Part Seven
Here is part seven (the final part) of my non-fiction work about the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. You can also read parts one, two, three, four, five an…
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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How to build a windmill
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they…
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The 5GHz “Problem” for Wi-Fi Networks: DFS (2018)
Wi-Fi networking provides us with 2 bands for the operation of wireless LAN networks: the 2.4Ghz band and the 5GHz band. The 2.4GHz band has...
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Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick , a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
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Can I drop a pacemaker 0day?
Can I drop a pacemaker 0day at DefCon that is capable of killing people? Computers now run our cars. It's now possible for a hacker to i...
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The 2020 iPhone SE
The iPhone SE is an excellent value if you’re fine with the smaller display and Touch ID instead of Face ID. It’s an astoundingly good value if you flat-out prefer the smaller form factor and familiar Touch ID experience.
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How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button
UPDATE: I’m now selling ready-to-use buttons at Buttonjoy.com!
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UPDuino: a $9.99 FPGA
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
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I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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The Rubik's Contraption
A collaboration with Jared . Before any build log, here's a video: That was a Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. The t...
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Librem 5: First Impressions
The Librem 5 does not run Android or iOS, it runs a proper Linux operating system ( PureOS , derived from Debian). There are hardware kill switches for the baseband modem, the camera and microphone, and WiFi and bluetooth. The phone's main selling point is that it doesn't spy on you.
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I hacked SONOS and YouTube the same day
Or how to play YouTube videos on you SONOS, easy and for free.